Dreaming and After
by miss-emotive
Summary: Your whispered words I longed to catch upon my tongue. She said, I need a wish, and that has all Watanuki can think about.
1. Prologue: My Winter

**Prologue**  
My Winter

The first time I saw you I wouldn't -- couldn't -- believe that you were human. I thought a winter sprite had wandered into Yuko's shop then, looking for a wish. You looked enchanting, dark and pale at the same moment. Those eyes, like cracked glass, bright and shifting in the afternoon light. I wanted to hold out my hand to you. Hold out my hand and ask you, who are you and where have you come from? I could not remember an instance when I was not mesmerised by you. Who are you to make me think only of you? The wicked white witch.

The last time I saw you I wouldn't -- couldn't -- believe that it would be the last time, although I knew somewhere inside of me that it would be. It was December then, and you and I were downtown observing the crystal lace frost of the shop displays. You were wearing a white coat, and when you leaned forward to gaze at the display window I saw the two of us in the reflected in the glass. At first I couldn't understand that the boy with glasses and the beautiful girl was you and I; I couldn't understand suddenly why I was standing there with you. Why you had not always been with me. You were born a day ahead of me, so I had never lived in a world without you.

There was frost on the ground outside of the apartment when we arrived. You, in that white coat, snowflakes clinging on to your eyelashes like living creatures in love, casting spells with your eyes. They brushed against the top of your cheeks when you closed your eyes and stood on your tiptoes, crushing your mouth against mine -- furious, tongue and teeth like that one time -- and I possessed you for a moment. Or was it you possessing me?

Kimihiro, you said. Do you love me?

How could I not? My wicked white witch. I wanted to tell you, wanted to sing out praise, the high note that breaks the glass and spills the liquid but my voice stopped working, my throat was stuck. You touched my face, took my hand. You brushed my fingertips against your lips before you turned, wordlessly, and climbed into the driver's seat of your mother's silver Toyota. The windows were rolled up and you wouldn't look at me. You started the engine. You shifted gears. You pulled out. I couldn't even see the back of your head for all of the boxed piled up in the back seat.

The winter that year was cold, but it was nothing compared to the cold in my heart. I stood frozen on the spot as I watched you drive further and further away. When the car disappeared around the corner I knew that there would be no more you, nothing left of you with me but the scent and taste of your mouth, your hair, on my skin which will linger for only a week before fading forever.

- - **D R E A M I N G & A F T E R** - -  
an xxxHOLiC fanfiction by Jun-Ko


	2. Part One: My Spring

**Part 1**  
My Spring

I wondered why I had never seen you at school before. It was too big to have seen you every day but still small enough to have seen you at least once. And after all, I would have remembered you. No one but Himawari-chan had ever made my heart beat like that. I would have remembered such a face. Lips and eyes.

Now I'm thinking of a certain June just after an evening of yukata fireworks and tsukimizake. It was on the riverbank. The air was so sweet. By my elbow, Himawari let out awed sighs and gasps with each colorful explosion of fire, the sparkling golds, glittering reds, mesmeric blues, silver streaks like bits of broken stars. I kept on expecting to hear the twinkling fragments to tinkle like windchimes on the evening breeze. Yuko-san, in a crimson butterfly-patterned kimono. Doumeki, distant and cold.

The spring before, the cherry blossoms had smelled so sweet, falling upon my tongue drops of sugar. It made the river water so clean and sky-blue, and the evening of the summer fireworks something happened.

Weeks later you came into the shop confused and unaware of what you had instigated from the simple action of crossing the threshold and catching my eye. Catching, and holding. You have this quality that makes me feel like you maybe aren't real and that I'm just dreaming, although you are just a photograph now. Alive somewhere, but only ink and glossy paper to me. Why is it that your printed face is so cold when you look so silky sleek and warm? I keep on running your image through my finger hoping to remember the texture of your skin, the tones in your hair, but the picture, from a 400-yen amusement park booth, is in black and white.

The one spring when the cherry blossoms where the sweetest... The summer that followed with the evening fireworks and sleeping river nymphs... That was when you appeared and unsettled my heart with a single glance.


	3. Part Two: My Breath

**Part 2**  
My Breath

I remember when I saw you in the water once. I couldn't believe it; I thought I was dreaming. The graceful form of you on the surface, just floating on your back facing the sky, eyes closed, lids quivering. Your jet black hair was a dark feathery halo around your head. Your body silk with summer heat, the water faithful to you, supporting your shape.

I remember, if I fell in... I would die. Have I died? Are you real? Who are you? If I had died then it would have been okay because I would have been living in a world that had never existed without you in it.

If I were drowning, would you buoy me up in your arms and press me against your breast my savior madonna dreamer where you would swim me to shore, keeping my head above the water and haul me onto the bank where my hair was as slick black and wet as yours and my empty eyes were pummeled stones, glasses forgotten on the wayside, and I would see you with the light shining behind your head blinding me and those eyes and that gaze like cracked green glass full of pain and in the moment and eternity that follows you are and will forever be my breath.

I remember your thin arms and long slender legs, the hollow at your knees when they were bent, the in-step of your feet, your pomegranate toes. The Okinawa beach towel. Your skin snow upon the water, nipples that grazed the surface, tremulous beads and your mouth, still, pink lips and strong white teeth that bit my tongue and made my mouth bleed on many occasions when you kissed me so hard and took my breath away.

I hold the photo of you next to my reflection and practice a pout. We've the same skin and hair, and from the picture our eyes could have been the same color, although I know they aren't. We could have been brother and sister. You you me me. Why couldn't you see exactly what you've done to me?

"Bullshit." The word sounded dirty and cheap uttered within the walls of Yuko-san's shop and home.

"What?"

You were beautiful and benevolent, so arrogant with your disbelief. You looked ready to spit, "You can't sell wishes. That's bullshit."

I had taken for granted all people who came into the shop without a doubt about the nature of Yuko-san's services. I never once thought that I would have to play the satisfied customer with the testimonials and cheesy commercial smile. I had, too, been in your position, but unlike you, I had accepted the information without hesitation. That was always the difference between you and I. I always had something to believe in.

Silk and satin and butterflies. Yuko-san smiled her smile, her Cheshire cat grin, and stretched out on her couch like a sated predator having devoured its prey. Opium burning, making me light-headed. Littled twisted ball of pleasure curling onto smoke from inside her silver pipe. Her voice was crushed velvet and shadows and forbidden trysts.

"Perhaps Shibahime-san has made a mistake in coming here." Ashes glow as Yuko takes another inhale. "Perhaps she has no wish and does not need this shop. What do you think, Watanuki-kun?"

I feel my confusion showing on my face. "But Yuko-san... doesn't everyone who enter..."

"Need this shop? Yes." She pauses, then turns to the girl who looks so familiar to me although I don't know why but makes me feel like I'm asleep and dreaming when I look at her.

"You can't sell wishes," you utter darkly, your green eyes wide.

"Is that a question or a statement?" Yuko teases, smiling still. ""If you are here then that means you're supposed to be here; there are no questions about that. Think about it carefully and when you need me, I'll be waiting."

But it would seem like forever would pass until you came back to the shop with the words, "I need a wish" upon your lips. But before that moment in time came, Yuko-san will tell me to see you out and I do without hesitation, watching you bend to put on your shoes. That's when I first notice the hollow dip at your knees and the bones in your ankles that look so brittle and ready to break despite your slenderness. As you step out of the door I open for you, you turn and look at me and chills run up and down my spine. How could someone like that have such a heavy gaze?

"You don't remember me, do you?"

... cracked green glass. Sakura trees.

"No, I don't," I say. "Sorry."

I waited for you once. I didn't know then and I don't know now but I was on my way home after making another meal for Yuko and her girls and Mokona when I saw you behind the counter at a coffee shop frequented by schoolgirls and business men, wiping down spilled cappuccino. I didn't go in because it felt better to just watch you without you noticing me, and I decided to wait for you.

I sat down on a bench across the street with my school bag on the ground next to my feet and waited, a stalker and voyeur, taking pleasure in watching the way you took coins into your palm and the way you tucked your hair behind your ear. You whirred and stirred, creating delicious beverages and serving customers with a commercial smile that never quite reached your eyes, and I watched, unconsciously wanting to be that bill being passed into your hands just so you'd have touched me. How I longed to be cream you poured into the paper cups, the candy bits sprinkled onto the foam.

I'll think of this moment when, later, you invite me in for lunch at the apartment -- "Watanuki-kun, just in time." I strained to taste you in the soup. I watched you dice potatoes and chop celery and vermicelli and pour vegetable broth longing to be passed through your hands. And then I watched you when you led me out to the balcony and pulled out a gold-tipped cigarette, smoking with no regard to decency and composture. You were wearing your school gym shorts and a loose black shirt and white socks. I watched you stick your green lighter into your pocket and smoke until there was barely anything left. You threw it over the balcony and turned to me and I knew then what it was in your eyes.

"Does it scare you?" you asked.

Christ, does it scare me? I've seen things that no one else could even imagine. Spider ladies house spirits rain children dancing skeletons spectral mists possessed flowers and weeping ghosts. Would it scare me? Not after that.

But that day outside of the coffee shop, I was scared. I was scared of what you were doing to me. I sat there for what must have been hours but sunset and closing come too soon. All of the shoppers and pedestrians had gone home; they had all gone home before I did and I saviored this like a victory. I had out-waited even the most patient by-stander just for you, but you didn't come out. Only later did I think that you must have left through a backdoor and how stupid of me not to have realized. You were long gone and I was waiting for a ghost not yet dead. I had waited for hours, holding my breath, and since you were and are still my breath, then doesn't that mean I was holding you?


	4. Part Three: My Morning

**Part 3**  
My Morning

A month after the fireworks you entered the shop for the first time. Another month passed before you returned, saying, "I need a wish."

It would be much later until the two of us sat on the garden wall outside of the apartment building, your skinny legs stretched out before you when you'd say that you were angry at the shop for selling wishes. You had wished a thousand wishes before that time, all of them important -- no doubt to you -- and none of them came true and why now did there suddenly appear a shop with a woman inside who granted them? I couldn't understand at the time. You were crying and clutching something to your chest. You're working with a woman who barters dreams, you said, as if accusing me of murder. And now you had no choice but to do as that woman said because otherwise your wish would never come true. You pulled your legs closer to you and I let you cry until you were satisfied. You looked so tall and strong compared to most girls but you were still able to break down. It seemed like a privellege and you seemed like you needed it, like you'd been holding it in for so long, so I didn't pull you to me and told you not to cry although I desperated wanted to.

As tall as you were (just an inch or two shorter than me), Yuko-san still towered over you as you said the words, "I need a wish," and she smiled. I though, _her soul..._

What is the soul to a girl like you? What is it for you? You aren't shallow so it wouldn't be your looks, and you aren't selfish so it wouldn't be money. What so precious to you that you wouldn't be willing to part with it without something of equal value?

"I need a wish," was all I heard before Yuko asked me to leave, and for once, I obeyed her completely. It seemed wrong to listen in on your transaction, although it would haunt me until I discovered what you had wished for, and what you had given up for it to come true.

That morning, I remember because of the lonely weak sunlight. The house was dark and empty-looking that Sunday.

A week later, as I sat on my balcony taking in the morning, I would see a moving van pull up to the side of the building. I would see strong, heavy men hauling boxes and tables and couches and hear them wheeze and haul up to the floor below me. I would see a silver Toyota pull up into the parking space that used to be empty and I would see a black-haired girl with snow-colored skin and spring-colored eyes step out of the driver's seat and I would find my heart beating so loudly in my chest that I thought it would jump out and fall the five stories down where you catch it in your alabaster hands and hold it for ransom until the day you left.


	5. Part Four: My Wish

**Part 4**  
My Wish

You transferred to my school shortly afterwards, although we weren't in the same class. I heard that you were from Okinawa and I wondered if it was hard adjusting to this city. I wondered why you moved here, when the rest of your family would arrive (since I'd only seen you arrive at the apartment and no one else since).

I was shocked to see you in the halls.

"Shibahime-san!"

The students stopped to stare. At me or at you? Normally anyone would have ducked their heads in embarassment but not me and certainly not you. Undaunted, you said, "what?" I found myself outside on the school grounds, you leaning against the building asking you questions, all which you artfully dodged.

"What a coincidence," Yuko-san laughed when I told her about it.

I stopped. "But... you said there was no such thing as coincidence."

She smiled but didn't answer; instead, I was in the kitchen preparing tempura veggies and sake once more. 

When I opened the door, you were standing there. You were born a day ahead of me so I had never lived in a world without you. Had you too been a child once? It's hard for me to imagine that. In my mind you were you from the first day. You came out with snow-white skin and long black hair that was never loose but always up in a ponytail and that intense stare that was as frightening as it was fascinating. Are you still that way? If I could go to Yuko-san and ask for a way to see you, I would, but part of me knew that it couldn't be done not matter what I offered as payment. You didn't want to be seen and so you would stay hidden from me now until I died and then you died. And yes, I know that I will die before you, completing my truth of a world where you had always existed.

When I opened the door, you were standing there. Innocuous. Detached. You were wearing the Cross High School uniform standing on my doormat, hold my mail out to my face.

"They were in my letterbox," you said nonchalantly, holding them out to me as if they were both delicate and disgusting. "One floor wrong."

I stood there dumbly, trying to comprehend the reason why this girl was at my doorstep and why I was blushing so hard. Should I take the letter and invite her in? Should I thank her? Should I offer her tea? My mind was racing, and I didn't know if the lack of emotion in your eyes, or your voice, that chilled me more. All I know is that you were too cold and I wanted to warm you; I wanted to pull you to me until your reserve melted and you could be free to feel. Would you allow me to embrace you just once, fully? Let me hold you and touch your forehead and your soft temples and your smooth cheeks, your pouty lips, your ears that were pierced so many times, kiss the silver stud nestled below your lower lip, in the dip above your chin.

Hesitantly, I slid the letters from your grasp and too late realized that my mouth was hanging open. I closed it, and you said, "we're going to be late for school."

"Oh, right." I remembered why I opened the door in the first place. I laughed nervously and shut the door behind me, only to realize that I had fogotten my shoes. You must have thought me a fool but that's okay because every day after that, I would open the door in the morning and you would be there. It wasn't my wish but it was good enough for the time being.


	6. Part Five: My Obsession

**Part 5**  
My Obsession

I followed you once. I don't think you noticed me but if you had you didn't say anything afterwards and you didn't make any efforts to hide. Maybe you had wanted me to see you then because that way you wouldn't have had to say anything at all. Words were never your strong point and sometimes speaking hurts.

The year the sakura trees smelled the sweetest... the year at the summer festival when I heard the stars singing... The year I met you.

You were an ocean too vast and deep for me to explore entirely. I could go out and swim for as long as my body would allow but I knew that I would never know you completely. No. To do that would have taken a lifetime that neither of us had. The depth and sadness was too much, pushing against my eyelids, rocking me into fitful sleep and you, my tremulous dream, would be waiting for me at the rock bottom with your arms open and welcoming, a selkie, a mermaid, a sea nymph, your face softening with love as I drowned in the reflection of the sky on the water's surface. But in this sea of souls I would never be able to find you, even if I had tried.

The path you took after school was old and well-worn, a dirt rut winding through the green grass that stretched from school to the busy street. I thought about your wish and wondered what it was but mostly I wondered where it was you were going, and why were your footsteps so heavy. Stoic and beautiful you walked alone through the park past young couples on picnics and playground children, sandbox children, and because you brought out the stalker in me I followed with no other thought but to follow, my only concern being detection.

Imagine for a second that something very precious to you, like a lover or a family member, was in danger of disappearing forever, Yuko-san told me. I was sitting before her as she poured herself a glass of sake. Imagine that you had to sit back and watch it happen, unable to do anything. If the opportunity to save them suddenly appeared, but at the cost of losing them from yourself, would you take it? If the price for them to live was for you to stay away from them forever, would you still want it?

I said I didn't know.

When you arrived at the hospital, I didn't know what to think. Did this have anything to do with your family? Why they hadn't moved in with you yet even though a week had already passed since you arrived at the apartment?

Were you alone, too? Alone as me? I had wanted it then and I still want it now; for the two of us to be alone together. Maybe then I could have known you more, the ocean of you and you could have pulled me out of the waters of forgetfulness, of dreamless sleep.

You told me, _I need a wish. I need you to grant my wish._

"What did she wish for, Yuko-san?" I asked. I wanted to know -- how could a girl so opposed to the concept of wishing being used as bullets and barter suddenly come to need a wish so badly. What would a girl like you need? And what could a girl like you have traded for it?

_... if the opportunity to save them suddenly appeared, but at the cost of losing them from yourself, would you take it?_

I know now and the answer would be yes. If you were dying, lying on a white bed lost in a tangle of needles and wires, living and breathing through tubes, then yes, I would give up everything to save you. To save you, I would even give up you. I didn't understand that then but now that I'm older I do and it's tearing me apart.

"You should not ask the wish granter when you could ask the wisher," she said.

"But... I can't," I said.

"And why not?" Yuko challenged. "You see her every morning. You live in the same apartment, you go to the same school. This is obviously hitsuzen at work."

Hitsuzen. Inevitability. How many times have I heard that word being thrown around since the day I met Yuko-san? Was everything I did really hitsuzen, or was hitsuzen determined by me?

"I.. can't."

I've seen you cry once when I asked you. When you condemned me for working with Yuko-san, like I had committed murder. I've seen the pain questions cause you and I didn't ever want to do that to you again.

"Then you will never know, Watanuki."

"Is Watanuki-kun upset?" Himawari-chan smiled as she opened the bento I made her.

"You're usually flailing around by this time," intoned Doumeki.

It was true. Himawari's smile used to send me spiralling into love-struck rapture and Doumeki's comment would have annoyed me. But at that point in time I had had something else to occupy my thoughts and spend my energy on, and it was so clear that even someone as oblivious as pretty-headed Himawari-chan had noticed.

What was happening to me to have made me change so much in so little time? What was it that no longer made me ecstatic at Himwari's smile but made my heart race every time I saw a flash of black hair? Who are you and what have you done to me to make me think only of you to dream of you to be breathing you and speaking you and hearing you always? At the time you were only a curiosity, an oddity I longed to decipher -- you weren't even beautiful to me then because I made the mistake of thinking you plain -- but now you are more than that.

You are the mother and I am a child longing to feel safe in your arms. You are the savior who pulls me out of the water and shares with me her breath. You are the girl who smokes on the balcony and flicks her ashes onto the wind then turns to me and asks me if her feelings for me scare me. You are the lover who pushes me down with all of the grace and beauty of an ocean and our fingers like seaweed wave in the current, our voices mingling and twining, untwining, rising and sinking to the surface and the bottom, drowning in our shallow regret.

There was a little girl on the white bed lost in a tangle of needles and wires. She was living and breathing through tubes. You crumpled by her side onto the sterile floor, sobbing silently but not touching. It was all so clear but still so vague; she had the right hair and the right skin. She even had the same beauty mark below her left eye. She looked like a smaller version of you.

Was this who your tears were for? Was this who you were saving and giving up? But if you were gone who would take care of her? I read the name on the door -- Shibahime Kioku. Who would take care of the child named Memory? If you were gone and she lived, who would look after her?

I stood there and watched as you cried and Kioku breathed.


	7. Part Six: My Truth

**Part 6**  
My Truth

I drowned once. Water filling my lungs stopping my breath choking me pulling me down and down. After a while it didn't hurt anymore. It was so calm and black and warm, like falling asleep but knowing that you would never wake up. Everything was silent, nothing was moving. If this was how my parents felt when they died then I regret having wished them back into a world full of pain.

I watched you as your sobbing stopped and you regained your composure. It was amazing to see, as if watching a wrecked building reconstruct itself one brick at a time. How badly I wanted you to say my name.

I wanted to turn and rush out out before you had a chance to see me standing in the doorway, the stalker and voyeur that you'd turned me into. I felt this interest in you had already gone too far, not knowing that it had yet to go further. That night was the first time I dreamed about you and I felt as if I had violated some kind of space in our delicate acquaintanceship by doing so. Would you not want to walk with me to school the following day? Would you find me trecherous and perverse? You were vulnerable to me in my dreams. I left early the next morning so that I wouldn't have had to face you. I was afraid that you would see what I had seen about you the day before, and upon touching my skin all would be revealed, and you would recoil, disgusted.

It would be a long time before I would discover that you had watched me as often as I had watched you. You told me once that you found nothing about me distasteful. You said, let me wash the dirt from your feet and scrub your body clean. As for you, I was willing to wait upon you hand and foot, to devote myself to you entirely, to become a slave for you to do as you wish and obey your every command. I will do anything you ask of me. I would give you my flesh if only it would buy me more time spent in fleeting happiness with you. Offer me your bare skin for pain out of pleasure, or pleasure to quell your pain, and I will do it. I cannot keep your heart so I will take your soul and your tears and lock them away, as you and I have locked our hearts away for only each other until we both can both breath normally again.

I drowned once. On the single bed that was my altar, my sleeping brain remembered something I had dismissed as a dream. I had been pulled down into the water by cold wrapped around my ankles. I drowned... I would have drowned if not for the warm arms that wrapped themselves around me and pulled me back up into the world above. When I opened my eyes again I was staring up at the moon through a window at Yuko's house. I thought that she had been the one to save me but before I said anything she shook her head and told me _it wasn't me_, and outside the sounds of the summer festival dying far away, like a girl whispering secrets in a foreign language.

What are you doing here in this hospital room, crying over a dying child? I'd have thought your tears would be like liquid emeralds, pearldrops, sunstones, but they are just tears. What are you doing here? Turn and tell me. With your voice that sounds like stars singing and your scent like sakura trees, turn and tell me everything as I open my arms to you and welcome you with all the love in my body if only you'd turn around and say my name.

I wanted to turn and run but my body was frozen. I think I was shaking, and again and again through my mind I thought, is she your child? If she is your child then who is the father and where is he now? If you had to give her up, who would take care of her.

Too late I realized that you stood up and turned around, and you stopped in your tracks when you saw me.

"Shibahime-san..."

"Watanuki, what are you doing here?" you gasped. You wiped your eyes with your sleep furiously as if crying were forbidden for you. "Get out."

"But, Shibahime..."

Why won't you let me see you? I want to see you. I want to be with you. The truth was that that was the moment I knew I had fallen for you.

"Please, get out."

My foot took a step forward, my hand hesitantly outstretched towards you. "Shibahime-san, I want to help... please, let me help you..."

You screamed, "I said, _get out!_"

I turned and ran.


	8. Part Seven: My Sacrifice

**Part 7**  
My Sacrifice

The following morning, I opened the door to the hallway and saw you. You were sitting on the low concrete wall and you said, _I'm sorry._

You were the most beautiful to me then. Your hair fall down in black waves around your pale face, over your shoulders, down your back. You always had it up. Now you were sitting outside my apartment suite looking ready to cry again, and for the first time, I was able to open myself to you, and you stepped forward to accept me. From beneath the crashing waves I hear your star-tinkling voice calling my name, knowing that if I jumped into the water to be with you I would drown... but the salt no longer stings my eyes. I would welcome a thousand deaths if only you were at the end of each one.

"You asked her," Yuko-san said later on. "Good for you." But she already knew I would. It was hitsuzen, after all.

The little girl has cancer, you said. You face was expressionless, stone. We were sitting outside in our uniforms playing hooky for the day when you, with your eyes darting everywhere but towards me, told me about how you had wished a thousand wishes before that time and none of them had come true. The girl had cancer and it was because there were better hospitals here than in Okinawa that your family was forced to move. She had been doing well -- she liked the bustling city life and had a lot of fun during the summer -- but when the cancer suddenly began to attack her bone marrow and now her hair was falling out, she had collapsed right in front of you and she was bleeding hard so hard and you cried to match. This was after the summer fesitval, but before the second time you entered the shop -- you said "entered the shop" with such distain; I knew it was because for you it was like admitting defeat.

"I hate what you do," you said. You were angry with me for working at a shop that sold wishes. You had wished a thousand times before, had made a thousand paper cranes, praying for the girl to get better but then she collapsed and you could no longer sit back and hope for a miracle because none of those wishes came true, and it wasn't fair now that there was a store that granted them for a price. Like they were impersonal, factory-made merchandise. Like they weren't precious.

"She's my sister," you said. Your sister, Kioku, who would look exactly like you if she had a chance to grow up.

Your stone mask is crumbling. How beautiful it was in its demise.

I wished a thousand wishes for her to get better, you said. None of them came true. And now you had traded her memory of you for her health, and that was why the cancer had regressed, and we both knew that when she wakes up, she will not remember her older sister, and her parents will not remember their eldest child. Because of this, I saw you cry a second time, and although I wanted nothing more but to hold you I didn't. I wasn't sure if you would have hated me if I had but I didn't want to risk it. You had so much hate already that I didn't want to add to it anymore than I already had. You hated your sister for falling sick, hated the doctors who didn't know how to save her, hated Yuko-san for selling you your wish in exchange for a memory -- your sister's memory of you, to be precise -- and hated the fact that when the cancer would eventually regress and Kioku would open her green eyes she would never remember having a sister, and your parents would not remember their eldest child.

I want to possess at least the smallest bit of power to grant wishes. If I could have, I would never have asked you for such a price. I would have had you whisper them in my ear and I would collect them like pearls to make into a necklace, granted them each with all of the love in my veins that I had for you, that had replaced my blood for you, and taken my payment in the smiles they would have brought you. I would have held you in my arms, towering over you, a giant devoted to you, sweeping you up and letting you ride on the wind. Written in ether glistening in the universe, diluting, swelling, dancing between the nebulae and constellations are your whispered words I longed to catch upon my tongue like rain.


	9. Part Eight: My Summer

**Part 8**  
My Summer

This wasn't all for you. Not at first. There was a time when my existence didn't feel so closely tied in with yours, when your breath was my breath, your blood my blood. This wasn't for anyone. But then you changed all that. You changed everything. You changed me.

I remember that one time I played hooky because my head felt already too full for me to go to school. I didn't know what I was going to do all day, having no experience in skipping class. I ended up going to Yuko's shop. It was raining that day, and she asked me, after Maru and Moro opened the paper doors for me, to read to her, of all things.

"You have a beautiful voice, Watanuki," Yuko-san crooned. "When you're not whining, that is.

"Come, read to me. Come sit with little old me and help me sleep. The rain makes me tired."

I wondered, as I opened a gold-framed book, how old Yuko-san was.

She asked me to read a faery tale to her. The original story, the way it had been written over a hundred years ago. Not the cartoon movie where everything turns out right, neatly wrapped in a bow with the happily ever after and the ending kiss. It was the story where her sisters gave her a dagger which she had to use to kill her prince.

Unless the blood from his heart spills onto her legs before dawn of the final day, then she will not remain human, but turn into the foam that sits on the surface of the sea.

"Horrible, isn't it?" Yuko-san interrupted, uncrossing then crossing her legs over the edge of the couch. "All these conditions. Conditions. You can't get something for nothing, right? But what does she do, Watanuki?" Yuko took another drag of her opium pipe. I watched her pupils dilate through the thick smoke.

What does she do?

"She throws the dagger away," I said. "She doesn't kill the one she loves. She lets herself die."

Yuko's eyelids were so heavy. I think of the way you looked at the hospital, on the floor, crying. Broken. Some things look better when they're broken.

Too-beautiful things.

_You don't remember me, do you?_

I can't get over how much she looked like you. How much Kioku looked like you. I thought she was your daughter. I was so afraid. Why? I don't even know. I found myself that day suddenly afraid of the fact that there were other men in the world. Someone other than me. I never entertained the thought of you ever feeling the same way about me but I never expected what I felt when I realized that you could be looking at someone else. That you could be with anyone who wasn't me.

"Do you want me to continue, Yuko-san?" I asked quietly. No answer.

I looked up at her but she was asleep. Maru and Moro, too. I let myself out as quietly as I could. It was still raining.

I don't know what it was that made me need you so badly all of a sudden. I wanted to see you, I needed you to be real. I ended up going back to the apartment with every intention of just going back to my place, maybe make myself some supper, then fall asleep to the static drone of the TV. I wasn't paying enough attention, or maybe I did it on purpose. I can't remember. I turned around the corner as I dug into my pocket for my key when I realized that, yes, I was at the right room, but I was on the wrong floor. This was your suite. I should turn around and just go away, or did I knock? I don't know. Maybe I was about to leave or maybe not but either way, at that moment, you opened the door and the smell of simmering soup, tomatoes, celery, vermicelli.

"Watanuki, just in time."

"What are you doing here?"

"Playing hooky. And you?"

I pause. Smile. You are silver in the rainy light. Golden in the weak sun. Rainy warmth. Summer shudder.

"Stopping by for lunch."

You are the mother and I am a child longing to feel safe in your arms. You are the savior who pulls me out of the water and shares with me her breath. You are the girl who smokes on the balcony and flicks her ashes onto the wind then turns to me and asks me if her feelings for me scare me. You are the lover who pushes me down with all of the grace and beauty of an ocean and our fingers like seaweed wave in the current, our voices mingling and twining, untwining, rising and sinking to the surface and the bottom, drowning in our shallow regret.


	10. Part Nine: My Fairytale

**Part 9**  
My Fairytale

I am the priest in the temple devoted to you. I am the boy slowly sinking, down down, into the dark deep depths of the ocean, and the ocean is dreaming, and I am drowning. I was asleep for the longest time before you came and woke me up and at first I was angry and I couldn't understand why. I didn't know where I was to begin with, and then you appeared out of nowhere looking for a wish, picking me up by the scruff like a stray cat and dropping in into an unfamiliar place, calling out to me. I am reaching up towards the starlit sky above the surface of the water, up to grab the pearl moon, up to grab your pearl colored hand that is now pulling me up for air.

I dreamed of you with white flowers in your black hair. You were asleep and your dress was in tatters, showing here and there beneath it. You were vulnerable in my dreams. In my dream, the world suddenly fell away to give into a watery darkness. Bubbles of precious air were escaping my silently screaming mouth, my hands clawing up to the surface where a white marble, the moon, looked down upon me, smiling serenely, watching me drown. My lungs were burning, ready to explode. Everything was cold.

It wasn't too long before my body began to give up, to give in to the permanent stillness that waited for me at the bottom of the river. What was I doing there anyway, you asked? Why, enjoying the summer festival, of course.

Just as the world drifted away from my vision something exploded above me. The muffled, underwater sound of something large, like the body of a teenaged girl, breaking the surface of the water and gliding like a mermaid with her seaweed-black hair rippling behind her, swimming down towards the dying boy in the summer yukata, who she will embrace tightly to her naked chest and pull, with all of her strength, back up towards the land where there is air and life and fireworks... such bright fireworks -- but, funny, they're all green. Green and slick, wet, like cracked green glass.

_You don't remember me, do you?_

Emerald bits of stars falling onto my tongue sweet like sakura blossoms honey blood milk the river tears wishes.

I remember the one time we went out. It was close to December. You were eighteen and you bought cigarettes and matches in a vintage tin and you didn't care that people were staring at you as you lit up right in the middle of the square. You were wearing a white winter jacket -- so white, it hurt my eyes -- and black tights and black boots. You wouldn't look at me. I could tell that you wanted to cry. I didn't even ask if I could tag along with you, wherever you were going, but you didn't say that I couldn't come so I just followed.

We caught the train in Shibuya station, caught in the brightly-colored paper-faced crowd like flimsy fish, and I can still feel how crammed the carriage was even though it was after rush hour. You had your back against the door and a man in a crisp grey suit was pushing me up close to you. Not close enough so that we were pressed up against each other, the way we were when we later made love, but just enough that I could smell your smell, feel the warmth radiating off your skin. You were looking down, your eyes closed. I wanted to embrace you.

We got off and walked down a brightly lit street side by side and oh, how I wanted to reach out and hold your hand but we weren't boyfriend-and-girlfriend, we weren't lovers, we were simply two people who knew each other and wanted each other but couldn't have each other. I kept on looking at the junction of your neck and shoulder, thinking about how soft you would be if I'd bitten you there. Your collarbone looked so delicate; I bet it would have just melted in my mouth. It would taste like a wedding feast. A black cat darted across our path; it agreed to be best man and our bouquets were the flowers growing by the public benches. We had thousands of guests, mostly fireflies and midges, and we both decided that we were old enough to give ourselves away. I wanted to marry you.

What beautiful shoulders you have, I said. You looked up, faintly smiled.

I realized that you were leading us towards the hospital where your sister was staying.

"Today's the last day," you said, as we looked up at the looming concrete giant with the millions of tiny, rectangular glowing eyes. "Today is the last day I can see Kioku before the deal is in effect. I wanted you to be with me." You turned to look at me and for the first time, your eyes didn't look broken. They were still as sad as ever, but they were also calm and strong, the undisturbed surface of a lake, perfect glass.

We walked quietly and quickly, ignoring the nurses who asked for our names. Just before Kioku's room, I leapt over the gaping canyon before me and took your gloved hand; you didn't pull away, you squeezed my fingers. My heart exploded.

When we looked into Kioku's room through the glass window by her door, I saw a tall beautiful woman with pale, pale skin and raven hair, and a handsome man with green eyes and sandy hair. Kioku's eyes were open. She was talking and smiling, but family photo that had been on her nightstand was gone. The flowers you had brought the first time I followed you here were gone, too, the vase looking empty and untouched.

"I can hear her voice in my head," said you, quietly. "I can hear that woman's voice saying, 'take a good look. Take a good look at them now, girl, because you will never see them again.'"

"Yuko is not an evil woman," I said.

"She is the devil to me," you replied.

I dragged you to the carnival. My idea. I wanted to see some joy in those eyes. I'd never seen you smile fully. I'd never heard you laugh. In my dreams, you do, all of the time, but whatever version my mind creates at night does not do you justice, I know. Come, I will perform magic for you, grant you wishes, pull rabbits out of hats for you, set a clown car on fire, anything, please, just laugh. I bought you cotton candy and you nibbled timidly at it. Let us ride the ferris wheel and let me pretend for a moment that you and I are just a happy, normal couple of high school teenagers on a date at the carnival. Let's ride the roller coaster and scream aloud at all the twists and turns. The bumper cars, the games, the tunnel of love. But you tugged at my sleeve and said, "I want a picture." So, photobooth it is. Snap, snap, snap. For 400 yen, we can make these good times last forever...

But when the strip dropped down I picked it up and stared at the photo of the two of us and I found myself in reality again. I was kissing your cheek. You were shyly holding my arm. I think you were smiling at one point -- oh, god, you look beautiful.

"Marry me," I whispered, wrapping my arms around your shoulders, burying my face in your fragrant hair.

You were still. Stock still. You didn't say no. But you didn't say yes, either.

I open my eyes and I find myself in bed but it's not my bed it's your bed. It's soft and warm and perfumed and it's your bed. I am touched by the smooth cotton sheets and you are asleep beside me, not a breath, not a sound; like you are dead but your perfect breasts are rising and falling in a steady rhythm of life. As I stir, rubbing my eyes, remembering the day, you open your eyes and it's all that I see. Green.

"Watanuki-san?" you ask.

I can't stop staring at you.

"It was you," I say.

"What?"

"The summer festival. The river. I remember you now."

There is a long, long pause. A silence heavier than death. Slowly, you sit up, the sheets barely making a sound as they slide over your perfect skin. You wrap your arms around me from behind, resting your head on my shoulder, your chest pushing up against my back. Your hair, I smell for the first time with permission, is waterlilies and incense. Your deft fingers trace invisible tattoos on my chest. You say, you you me me I saved myself then. I had to.

I've stopped trying to visualize you happy. I've realized that some things look better broken.


End file.
